What's the current thinking on good, fast, effective virus scanning software for windows? Preferably free, or reasonably cheap? I quite liked AVG 7, but the new AVG 8 is very big, very slow, and very intrusive. On a friend's recommendation I tried Kaspersky 2010, but it's even bigger, even slower, MUCH more intrusive, and WILL NOT STOP SCANNING WHEN ASKED! I have to reboot the machine to stop it, the bloody thing completely ignores the 'for god's sake stop scanning now you bastard!" button. And when it's scanning the machine grinds to a complete halt for any other purpose.

At least AVG was reasonably accurate at estimating how long the process would take, this one seems to pull numbers out of thin air. On my games machine it was saying it would be finished in 10 minutes for about 14 hours And it finds all sorts of false positives it gets really excited about. Not impressed.

So, what should I be using? I'm going to try Avast as I've heard it's fairly good, but can anyone suggest something better?

pca